Analyses of God beliefs, atheism, religion, faith, miracles, evidence for religious claims, evil and God, arguments for and against God, atheism, agnosticism, the role of religion in society, and related issues.

Monday, December 8, 2008

In a comment on the last post, Casey gives us a very nice statement of an interesting objection:

Caloric, Phlogiston, luminous aether, epicycles, flat earth, the four humors, four elements, etc. I could name 500 "dead" scientific theories. So why believe that String Theory is correct? Science accepts that Phlogiston could end up being correct but until we get new evidence then we are to reject it.

"But these were all supernatural claims which have failed"

And these are all natural claims that have failed

"But we have gained information each time, and we're closer to the truth"

The same could be said for religious claims coming closer to understanding God's true nature.

"But there are a number of rivaling religious claims, and historically religious figures didn't act as if everyone was getting closer to the truth"

There are, similarly, a number of scientific theories which rival each other currently and historically each proponent of a scientific theory thought they had it figured out to some extent.

"But science is supposed to get things wrong, it's built into the system"

Why not grant the same fallibility to religious claims.

Now, this does still pose a problem to the theist since this analogy suggests the theist should be confidant that their religion is right as much as a scientist is confident that a particular theory is right, which is a significant blow to the extent faith should play.

Here’s the problem:

There’s a deep disanalogy in the cases. In science, we actively seek out disconfirming evidence for a hypothesis, and when we find it, we discard the model that doesn’t fit with our observations. Successive attempts to model, disconfirm, and arrive at a story that makes successful predictions and that accounts for our observations, including the ones that refuted the earlier models, entitles us to claim that the latest theory is better.

The project here has been to try to find some grounds to think that Christianity is different from the other bogus supernatural, paranormal, and magical claims, especially when it seems to fail for all the same reasons. Furthermore, Christianity is not the culmination of a progressive process of theorizing, testing, and revising. Like the other religions, it claims to have gotten it right from the start. It doesn’t build on their failures by learning and revising. It claims to have had an exclusive, complete representation of the whole truth all along, just like all of the other religions that have collapsed. Christianity can’t claim to have improved and progressed from the other failed religions—the vast majority of Christians haven’t even heard of most of the gods on that list. Neither Christians, nor the followers of the other gods, claim to have achieved a more comprehensive description of the world on the basis of the failures of other religious doctrines.

It would be ironic and perverse of the believer to claim, in response to my argument, that their belief in God and their doctrine is actually a sort of quasi-scientific hypothesis that is subject to the disconfirmations and revisions of scientific models of reality. If the Christian responds to my argument by suggesting that they are in a process of successively revising and improving our account of God in the light of new information and developments, then they’ve got a number of problems. The Christian religious tradition and doctrines, along with most other religious traditions, are fundamentally static. They claim to have an original, direct access to the truth that cannot and does not change with time. To find out what’s true about reality, they consult their book and their God. If what we see in the world appears to conflict with the book or what God says, then it is the observations that must be wrong. To allow that the central claim upon which the whole institution is built can be tested and revised in the light of any historical or empirical developments gives up the whole Christian enterprise.

We should welcome such a move from the Christian because it amounts to their giving up the whole foundation of truth that their movement claimed to be based upon. Revising their story about God’s nature would be rejecting the entire basis of authority that pitted them against scientific modeling of the world in the first place. If they budge on those sacrosanct foundations at all, then the whole edifice will immediately tumble down. If, contrary to what they’ve been saying for millennia, religious revelation has no special access to the truth, then it’s got no legitimate claim at all.

Let’s put the point this way. At some point in their histories, the U.S. and the British patent offices refused to take any more patent applications for perpetual motion machines. After considering stacks and stacks of crazy schemes that did not work, they felt entitled to put an end to a dead end pursuit. “We are not going to waste our time pursuing some far-fetched possibilities because we are justified in concluding that the whole enterprise is based on a mistake.” Only people who are caught up in the romance and who don’t know any better continue to try to build perpetual motion machines. I have been arguing that we can draw a similar lesson from the trash heap of history that is piled high with countless tales of religious bullshit. Only here, people’s fanatical attachment to religious ideas have kept them from acknowledging that they are throwing their lives away for an anachronistic fantasy.

Caloric, Phlogiston, luminous aether, epicycles, flat earth, the four humors, four elements, etc. I could name 500 "dead" scientific theories.

I would consider a number of the examples cited as pre-scientific, rather than scientific.

I have read of the beliefs about the nature of the world held by pre-Socratic philosophers. One would claim that the earth was flat, and that everything consisted of air, and the next that the earth was oval, and everything consisted of water, etc. The various views were all over the map, and there was no convergence, no accumulation of knowledge. They had not yet developed the scientific method, which is what enables us to experimentally determine which views are consistent with observed reality, and to discard those that aren't.

Good points all, Reginald. You're right. The analogy fails on several fronts, including the one you're making. But superficially, a believer might consider the 500 dead gods and think that a similar argument could be made against science. Putting one's finger on the difference is hard. Dead gods, I maintain, give us reason to doubt all god hypotheses, failed scientific hypotheses should not lead us to similarly doubt the enterprise of science.

The clarification was very helpful. This distinction may be trivial or superficial but this appears to not be an argument for atheism as it is an argument against truth-seeking processes which are "fundamentally static" and it just so happens that our scientific paradigm does not have this feature and the vast majority of religious claims do have this feature.

Not all religions claim they are complete, or derive their entire dogma from historical revelation.

Religions do derive concepts of god from other religions (Like virgin birth, but sometimes they just forget or don't acknowledge that they have)

Certainly I can find 500 examples of what the meaning of life was thought to be from 500 ancient worldviews (religions), We feel they were incorrect and some even exceedingly stupid. By the logic of your example we should conclude that life is likely meaningless. This is clearly nonsense.

Differences in the percieved name or nature of a god or of a purpose to the existance of the universe, do not contribute to the odds of either gods or purpose existing.

I think it is a big mistake to assume religions (worldviews) are fundementally static, or somehow not subject to the forces of evolution.

Evolution does not care about truth, only utility. So our vision is useful but not necessarily a true or complete rendering of the world. Religions similarly that have survived must either be useful, or not too harmful, but not necessarily true.In the same sense scientific knowledge is useful, but not necessarily a true explaination of how things work.

The eye did not evolve via the scientific method either. Can I conclude from 500 precursor eyes, that the eye will be useless or impossible?

Over the centuries a religion that reduced reproductive fitness should eventually fade (like the Quakers) So it is the effect of religion on societies that will select for "better" religions.

I think some people are interpreting MM's argument as saying "500 wrong views is reason for thinking that the next one of the same kind is false." The argument is then rejected, because on the same principle we would be forced to conclude that our most recent scientific theories are likely to be false.

But here's a huge difference: Matt is not talking about the truth/falsity of a belief but about whether one is epistemically justified in believing some claim.(If I'm reading correctly)

The argument is not that 500 wrong views in the past inductively implies that the next one is false. Rather, it's an attack on the justification in believing one particular explanation of some phenomenon, when 1) there are 500 other explanations which match up with the same observation/data, and 2) we have no good reason for accepting our explanation over the others.

So the disanalogy is this: in science, we are justified in believing our most recent theories/models, because, despite there being 500 other models (like phlogiston) explaining the same phenomenon , we can definitely provide good reasons for adopting our newer model over each and every model in the past that have failed. The scientific process is all about meeting that burden. But in the case of religion, good reasons to prefer one model/god over another are not given, and the discipline seems to carry on without addressing that burden.

Also, when giving reasons for believing in one model over another, we ought to stick with epistemic justification, not practical or pragmatic justification. So I don't think making the claim that both religion and science undergo the same evolutionary process of "only the theories which are useful to society will survive" would advance any argument here. We don't internally believe in Electromagnetism because it brings us TV and makes our lives better, even though at a sociological level it may be true that the utility of the theory is why it prevailed. Such a sociological fact, however, has nothing to do with epistemic justification (also called the genetic fallacy), and so one has yet to show that religion satisfies the same epistemic standard that science does.

Thank you, Tom. I am really surprised that so many people are so resistant to the suggestion that so many false gods in other cultures has some bearing on the reasonableness of believing in the God of our culture. There seems to be the wide assumption that "my god is different/better," but of course many of them are not really offering any real reasons for thinking that is true.

Rejected hypotheses in science (because they didn't fit our observations) are WHY we are justified in accepting the one we replaced them with.

The question comes down to what has been falsified or declared dead. There will eventually (if not already) be 500 discarded atheistic world views. Does this that one is epistomically justified in rejecting new atheistic world views. I don't think so.

There is only one right answer and an infitite number of wrong ones, so the odds of any one answer being right are infinitesimal. So by this reasoning we can reject everything.

Tom In my response I spoke of 500 dead meaings to life. Does this mean one is epistomically justified in concluding the universe is meaningless, or just that the next postulated "meaning" is not likely to be correct. If the post is really only arguing the latter I have no problem with it. It holds as true for theistic world views as atheistic ones, and scientific theories as well.But I think Dr McCormick wishes to apply it only to theistic world views, (hence the appeal to the scientific method and the scorn see below)"I have been arguing that we can draw a similar lesson from the trash heap of history that is piled high with countless tales of religious bullshit." There are also piles of atheistic bullshit and scientific bullshit (aether, refrigerater moms and maybe even string theory).

One doesn't need much justification (epistomically or otherwise) to speculate on (or reject speculations on) either side of an as yet untestable question.

Tully, while some religions believe that they are static, I think history shows them not to be.Slavery etc was once tolerated in many religions, but is nolonger (the same can be said about democracries)

Reginald, my eye example relates to how things advance due to mistakes, even without the scientific method. Dunbar in "the trouble with science" makes a strong case for science starting long before the "scientific method" was developed from chance discoveries. There is no reason to believe religions are immune form this sort of improvement.I will look into your recommendation on evolution. My thinking was mostly from Scott Atran's article about Guatamalan Indians, where he argues certain keystone species of their ecosystem were valued in the religion. Ie. that the culture (world view/religion) can be a repository of unconcious knowledge for a people. The truth that the one should not abuse keystone species is contained in their beliefs in certain tree spirits. In which case abandonning the religion before it was fully understood could be detrimental.

The only thing that can be gleaned from the 500+ reasoning is that the next one (idea of god, atheistic world view or scientific theory) is likely not to be the last one. Whether one should believe it depends on how much evidence is available, and at some level a choice of what weight to apply to each piece of evidence or argument.

Reginald, my eye example relates to how things advance due to mistakes, even without the scientific method.

Presumably via evolution through natural selection. The analogy to religions is not transparent.

Dunbar in "the trouble with science" makes a strong case for science starting long before the "scientific method" was developed from chance discoveries. There is no reason to believe religions are immune form this sort of improvement.

Yes there is. The supernatural is notoriously immune to verification. Unlike with scientific knowledge of the natural world, how does one determine which supernatural view is closer to truth? One brand of "making stuff up? is as good as another.

The only thing that can be gleaned from the 500+ reasoning is that the next one (idea of god, atheistic world view or scientific theory) is likely not to be the last one. Whether one should believe it depends on how much evidence is available, and at some level a choice of what weight to apply to each piece of evidence or argument.

Here is where your analogy fails hard. What does evidence have to do with the supernatural?

Evolution does not care about truth, only utility. So our vision is useful but not necessarily a true or complete rendering of the world. Religions similarly that have survived must either be useful, or not too harmful, but not necessarily true.

Just to detail some of the problems with this approach:

As mentioned previously, most researchers in the field acknowledge that religious beliefs themselves are not genetically inheritable, and instead focus on the possibility that religiosity, i.e. tendency towards belief, may be.

The evolutionary conclusion that religion is good for the population that holds it is unwarranted. It may simply be that the existence of the religion is good for the religion. If this is not clear, consider a comparison to viruses. The spread of a virus is good for the virus, not necessarily for the organisms which constitute its environment.

The actual inheritable trait may be only incidental to the supernatural aspects of the religion. I.e. suppose that a tendency towards extended social networks are good for survival, and also happen to be good for the spread of religion. This would in no way reflect on the truth of any supernatural claims made by a religion.

Evolution has no foresight, and is always local in time. A trait which is favorable in one environment may not be favorable when the environment changes.

Reginald I agree that the supernatural is immune from verification, as are (for the moment) other universes, so you are free to reject them out of hand, as one possibility out of an infinite set.

My argument is rather that the presence of 500 past examples of one suprenatural belief does not change the odds in any way.

It is important know what you mean by supernatural, because if by that we mean anything that is not currently believed to exist, then even other universes qualify.

I agree that a trait which is favourable in one enviroment may not be favourable in another. Cultural data can in principle change much quicker than genetic data, so it would allow a quicker change to the more effective stategy when the environment changed than if the strategy was genetically hard wired. So it make sense to me that once cultural data existed, it would become an excellent means of storing certain strategies. To work though these beliefs cannot be completely static. This is how I understand Richard Dawkins idea of memes.

I am not arguing that absolute truth exists, are you? Or that we can find absolute truths from studying old religions.

Your other point, whether religion could be a sort of mind virus is worth some consideration, although off topic for this thread.

It is possible that some religions are mind viruses. I don't think I am ready to classify all of them that way. Destructive thought patterns are not likely limited only to theistic ideas, so we need to be able to somehow test for them if it is to be a useful concept. Otherwise its just an exercise in name calling. Your worldview is a virus! No your's is!

Certainly harmful diseases exist. Diseases that affect only one species face alot of pressure not to cripple their host, and as a result tend to become less harmful over time and may eventually form symbiotic relationship with their host. Other diseases like sicle-cell anemaia are understood to be present, in spite of enormous pressure, because they offers some protection against greater threats (malaria in the case of sicle-cell)

So I see 4 possibilities for religion.

1)It is a destructive mind virus that does what it needs to do to survive (an unlucky invention or the gift of an evil being)

2)It is relatively harmless (from the point of view of evolutionary fitness) or the pluses and minus come close to zero, and so it avoids evolutionary pressures and persists like non-coding DNA baggage.

3) It has destructive elements, but it offers some protection against more destructive external agents. So the pluses were at one time and/or are still, greater than the minuses

4) It is entirely beneficial virus(a gift from god or a lucky cultural invention)

To me 2 and 3 seems most likely. History shows that #4 is not likely. #1 does not explain why some have persisted for so long.#3 allows that theistic religions might have outgrown their usefulness

This would only really hold for old religions. New religions could be of any kind. And it says nothing about the truth of the beliefs, only about the way it affects behaviours.

You have already correctly commented on my expertise in this field. Unfortunately I can only express what I think. And I still think the 500+ abandonned views is a bit of a red herring. It is not the fact that they were abandonned that matters, although why they were abandonned is relevant.

Your other point, whether religion could be a sort of mind virus is worth some consideration, although off topic for this thread.

It is possible that some religions are mind viruses. I don't think I am ready to classify all of them that way. Destructive thought patterns are not likely limited only to theistic ideas, so we need to be able to somehow test for them if it is to be a useful concept. Otherwise its just an exercise in name calling. Your worldview is a virus! No your's is!...

You are making rather too much of this. My sole point was that the survival and spread of religion or religiosity does not necessarily mean that it is good for the host, and this adds complication to an evolutionary argument.

Of course the believer in the possibility of Perpetual Motion would argue that the reason Patent Offices refuse to deal with their claims is not that the idea is fundamentally unsound but that if successful economic and social ramifications would be troublesome to say the least. In accordance with standard capitalist theory it makes much more sense to kill any research at source by removing the profit incentive.

As I see it the reasons we believe in things has very little to do with an recourse to 'objective' reality - if indeed one actually exists. Arguably the whole western analytic approach is flawed by the very paradigm that it works within. I find it beyond humorous that William Lane Craig does such a wonderful job of spreading his brand of nonsense using the very same tools.

Religions unlike scientific theories do not get disproved/ they die out (sometimes with help from other religions). The better analogy is with language. Should English be the official language of the United States? Is English the true language? Is English disproved by the disappearance of other languages?

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Atheism

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Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Rochester. Teaching at CSUS since 1996. My main area of research and publication now is atheism and philosophy of religion. I am also interested in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and rational decision theory/critical thinking.

Quotes:

"Science. It works, bitches."

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." - Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

"Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry for ever and ever until the end of time. But he loves you! He loves you and he needs money!"George Carlin 1937 - 2008

Many Paths, No God.

I don't go to church, I AM a church, for fuck's sake. I'm MINISTRY. --Al Jourgensen

Every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly; and where it fails them, they cry out, “It is a matter of faith, and above reason.”- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

If life evolved, then there isn't anything left for God to do.

The universe is not fine-tuned for humanity. Humanity is fine-tuned to the universe. Victor Stenger

Skeptical theists choose to ride the trolley car of skepticism concerning the goods that God would know so as to undercut the evidential argument from evil. But once on that trolley car it may not be easy to prevent that skepticism from also undercutting any reasons they may suppose they have for thinking that God will provide them and the worshipful faithful with life everlasting in his presence. William Rowe

Unless you're one of those Easter-bunny vitalists who believes that personality results from some unquantifiable divine spark, there's really no alternative to the mechanistic view of human nature. Peter Watts

The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. E.O. Wilson

Creating humans who could understand the contrast between good and evil without subjecting them to eons of horrible suffering would be an utterly inconsequential matter for an omnipotent being. MM

The second commandment is "Thou shall not construct any graven images." Is this really the pinnacle of what we can achieve morally? The second most important moral principle for all the generations of humanity? It would be so easy to improve upon the 10 Commandments. How about "Try not to deep fry all of your food"? Sam Harris

Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody--not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms--had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would think--though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one--that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great

We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true--that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow. Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great

If atheism is a religion, then not playing chess is a hobby.

"Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything--anything--be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in." Sam Harris, The End of Faith, 36.

"Only a tiny fraction of corpsesfossilize, and we are lucky to have as many intermediate fossils as we do. We could easily have had no fossils at all, and still the evidence for evolution from other sources, such as molecular genetics and geographical distribution, would be overwhelmingly strong. On the other hand, evolution makes the strong prediction that if a single fossil turned up in the wrong geological stratum, the theory would be blown out of the water." Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 127.

One cannot take, "believing in X gives me hope, makes me moral, or gives me comfort," to be a reason for believing X. It might make me moral if I believe that I will be shot the moment I do something immoral, but that doesn't make it possible for me to believe it, or to take its effects on me as reasons for thinking it is true. Matt McCormick

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Top Ten Myths about Belief in God

1. Myth: Without God, life has no meaning.

There are 1.2 billion Chinese who have no predominant religion, and 1 billion people in India who are predominantly Hindu. And 65% of Japan's 127 million people claim to be non-believers. It is laughable to suggest that none of these billions of people are leading meaningful lives.

2. Myth: Prayer works.

Numerous studies have now shown that remote, blind, inter-cessionary prayer has no effect whatsoever of the health or well-being of subject's health, psychological states, or longevity. Furthermore, we have no evidence to support the view that people who wish fervently in their heads for things that they want get those things at any higher rate than people who do not.

3. Myth: Atheists are less decent, less moral, and overall worse people than believers.

There are hundreds of millions of non-believers on the planet living normal, decent, moral lives. They love their children, care about others, obey laws, and try to keep from doing harm to others just like everyone else. In fact, in predominately non-believing countries such as in northern Europe, measures of societal health such as life expectancy at birth, adult literacy, per capita income, education, homicide, suicide, gender equality, and political coercion are better than they are in believing societies.

4. Myth: Belief in God is compatible with the descriptions, explanations and products of science.

In the past, every supernatural or paranormal explanation of phenomena that humans believed turned out to be mistaken; science has always found a physical explanation that revealed that the supernatural view was a myth. Modern organisms evolved from lower life forms, they weren't created 6,000 years ago in the finished state. Fever is not caused by demon possession. Bad weather is not the wrath of angry gods. Miracle claims have turned out to be mistakes, frauds, or deceptions. So we have every reason to conclude that science will continue to undermine the superstitious worldview of religion.

5. Myth: We have immortal souls that survive the death of the body.

We have mountains of evidence that makes it clear that our consciousness, our beliefs, our desires, our thoughts all depend upon the proper functioning of our brains our nervous systems to exist. So when the brain dies, all of these things that we identify with the soul also cease to exist. Despite the fact that billions of people have lived and died on this planet, we do not have a single credible case of someone's soul, or consciousness, or personality continuing to exist despite the demise of their bodies. Allegations of spirit chandlers, psychics, ghost stories, and communications with the dead have all turned out to be frauds, deceptions, mistakes, and lies.

6. Myth: If there is no God, everything is permitted. Only belief in God makes people moral.

Consider the billions of people in China, India, and Japan above. If this claim was true, none of them would be decent moral people. So Ghandi, the Buddha, and Confucius, to name only a few were not moral people on this view, not to mention these other famous atheists: Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Aldous Huxley, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, Carl Sagan, Bertrand Russell, Elizabeth Cady-Stanton, John Stuart Mill, Galileo, George Bernard Shaw, Gloria Steinam, James Madison, John Adams, and so on.

7. Myth: Believing in God is never a root cause of significant evil.

The counter examples of cases where it was someone's belief in God that was the direct justification for their perpetrated horrendous evils on humankind are too numerous to mention.

8. Myth: The existence of God would explain the origins of the universe and humanity.

All of the questions that allegedly plague non-God attempts to explain our origins--why are we here, where are we going, what is the point of it all, why is the universe here--still apply to the faux explanation of God. The suggestion that God created everything does not make it any clearer to us where it all came from, how he created it, why he created it, where it isall going. In fact, it raises even more difficult mysteries: how did God, operating outside the confines of space, time, and natural law "create" or "build" a universe that has physical laws? We have no precedent and maybe no hope of answering or understanding such a possibility. What does it mean to say that some disembodied, spiritual being who knows everything and has all power, "loves" us, or has thoughts, or goals, or plans? How could such a being have any sort of personal relationship with beings like us?

9. Myth: Even if it isn't true, there's no harm in my believing in God anyway.

People's religious views inform their voting, how they raise their children, what they think is moral and immoral, what laws and legislation they pass, who they are friends and enemies with, what companies they invest in, where they donate to charities, who they approve and disapprove of, who they are willing to kill or tolerate, what crimes they are willing to commit, and which wars they are willing to fight. How could any reasonable person think that religious beliefs are insignificant.

10: Myth: There is a God.

Common Criticisms of Atheism (and Why They’re Mistaken)

1. You can’t prove atheism.You can never prove a negative, so atheism requires as much faith as religion.

Atheists are frequently accosted with this accusation, suggesting that in order for non-belief to be reasonable, it must be founded on deductively certain grounds. Many atheists within the deductive atheology tradition have presented just those sorts of arguments, but those arguments are often ignored. But more importantly, the critic has invoked a standard of justification that almost none of our beliefs meet. If we demand that beliefs are not justified unless we have deductive proof, then all of us will have to throw out the vast majority of things we currently believe—oxygen exists, the Earth orbits the Sun, viruses cause disease, the 2008 summer Olympics were in China, and so on. The believer has invoked one set of abnormally stringent standards for the atheist while helping himself to countless beliefs of his own that cannot satisfy those standards. Deductive certainty is not required to draw a reasonable conclusion that a claim is true.

As for requiring faith, is the objection that no matter what, all positions require faith?Would that imply that one is free to just adopt any view they like?Religiousness and non-belief are on the same footing?(they aren’t).If so, then the believer can hardly criticize the non-believer for not believing. Is the objection that one should never believe anything on the basis of faith?Faith is a bad thing?That would be a surprising position for the believer to take, and, ironically, the atheist is in complete agreement.

2. The evidence shows that we should believe.

If in fact there is sufficient evidence to indicate that God exists, then a reasonable person should believe it. Surprisingly, very few people pursue this line as a criticism of atheism. But recently, modern versions of the design and cosmological arguments have been presented by believers that require serious consideration. Many atheists cite a range of reasons why they do not believe that these arguments are successful. If an atheist has reflected carefully on the best evidence presented for God’s existence and finds that evidence insufficient, then it’s implausible to fault them for irrationality, epistemic irresponsibility, or for being obviously mistaken.Given that atheists are so widely criticized, and that religious belief is so common and encouraged uncritically, the chances are good that any given atheist has reflected more carefully about the evidence.

3. You should have faith.

Appeals to faith also should not be construed as having prescriptive force the way appeals to evidence or arguments do. The general view is that when a person grasps that an argument is sound, that imposes an epistemic obligation of sorts on her to accept the conclusion. One person’s faith that God exists does not have this sort of inter-subjective implication. Failing to believe what is clearly supported by the evidence is ordinarily irrational. Failure to have faith that some claim is true is not similarly culpable. At the very least, having faith, where that means believing despite a lack of evidence or despite contrary evidence is highly suspect. Having faith is the questionable practice, not failing to have it.

4. Atheism is bleak, nihilistic, amoral, dehumanizing, or depressing.

These accusations have been dealt with countless times. But let’s suppose that they are correct. Would they be reasons to reject the truth of atheism? They might be unpleasant affects, but having negative emotions about a claim doesn’t provide us with any evidence that it is false. Imagine upon hearing news about the Americans dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki someone steadfastly refused to believe it because it was bleak, nihilistic, amoral, dehumanizing, or depressing. Suppose we refused to believe that there is an AIDS epidemic that is killing hundreds of thousands of people in Africa on the same grounds.

5.Atheism is bad for you.Some studies in recent years have suggested that people who regularly attend church, pray, and participate in religious activities are happier, live longer, have better health, and less depression.

First, these results and the methodologies that produced them have been thoroughly criticized by experts in the field.Second, it would be foolish to conclude that even if these claims about quality of life were true, that somehow shows that there is theism is correct and atheism is mistaken.What would follow, perhaps, is that participating in social events like those in religious practices are good for you, nothing more.There are a number of obvious natural explanations.Third, it is difficult to know the direction of the causal arrow in these cases.Does being religious result in these positive effects, or are people who are happier, healthier, and not depressed more inclined to participate in religions for some other reasons?Fourth, in a number of studies atheistic societies like those in northern Europe scored higher on a wide range of society health measures than religious societies.

Given that atheists make up a tiny proportion of the world’s population, and that religious governments and ideals have held sway globally for thousands of years, believers will certainly lose in a contest over “who has done more harm,” or “which ideology has caused more human suffering.”It has not been atheism because atheists have been widely persecuted, tortured, and killed for centuries nearly to the point of extinction.

Sam Harris has argued that the problem with these regimes has been that they became too much like religions.“Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag, and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.”

7.Atheists are harsh, intolerant, and hateful of religion.

Sam Harris has advocated something he calls “conversational intolerance.”For too long, a confusion about religious tolerance has led people to look the other way and say nothing while people with dangerous religious agendas have undermined science, the public good, and the progress of the human race.There is no doubt that people are entitled to read what they choose, write and speak freely, and pursue the religions of their choice.But that entitlement does not guarantee that the rest of us must remain silent or not verbally criticize or object to their ideas and their practices, especially when they affect all of us.Religious beliefs have a direct affect on who a person votes for, what wars they fight, who they elect to the school board, what laws they pass, who they drop bombs on, what research they fund (and don’t), which social programs they fund (and don’t), and a long list of other vital, public matters.Atheists are under no obligation to remain silent about those beliefs and practices that urgently need to be brought into the light and reasonably evaluated.

Real respect for humanity will not be found by indulging your neighbor’s foolishness, or overlooking dangerous mistakes.Real respect is found in disagreement.The most important thing we can do for each other is disagree vigorously and thoughtfully so that we can all get closer to the truth.

8.Science is as much a religious ideology as religion is.

At their cores, religions and science have a profound difference.The essence of religion is sustaining belief in the face of doubts, obeying authority, and conforming to a fixed set of doctrines.By contrast, the most important discovery that humans have ever made is the scientific method.The essence of that method is diametrically opposed to religious ideals:actively seek out disconfirming evidence.The cardinal virtues of the scientific approach are to doubt, analyze, critique, be skeptical, and always be prepared to draw a different conclusion if the evidence demands it.